We will take up today the study of the last part of the third paragraph relating to the fixed principles by which the physician must be guided. In time past, outside of the doctrinal statements of Homoeopathy, medicine has never been a matter of experience, and medicine today, outside of Homoeopathy, is a “medicine of experience.” Now, in order that the mind may be open to receive the doctrines, it is necessary that the exact and proper position of experience should be realized. If the true conception of law and doctrine, order and government, prevailed in man’s mind he would not be forever hatching out theories, as they would not be necessary, and moreover he would be wise enough to know and see clearly what is truth and what is folly.
Experience has a place in science, but only a confirmatory place. It can only confirm that which has been discovered through principle or law guiding in the proper direction. Experience lead to no discoveries, but when man is fully indoctrinated in principle that which he observes by experience may confirm the things that are consistent with law.
One who has no doctrines, no truth no law, who does not relay upon law for everything, imagines he discovers by experience. Out of his experience he will undertake to invent, and his inventions run in every conceivable direction; hence we may see in this century a medical convention of a thousand physicians who rely entirely upon experience, at which one will arise and relate his experience, and another will arise and tell his experience, and the talkers of that convention continue to debate and no two talkers agree.
When they have finished they compare their experiences and that which they settle upon they call science, no matter how far they may be from the truth. Next year they come back and they have different ideas and have had different experiences, and they then vote out what they voted in before. This is the medicine of experiences. They confirm nothing, but make from experience a series of inventions and theories. This is the wrong direction.
The science of medicine must be built on a true foundation. To be sure, man must observe, but there is a difference between true observation in a science under law and principle and the experience of a man who has no law and no principle. Old- fashioned medicine denies principle and law, calls its system the medicine of experience, and hence its doctrines are kaleidoscopic, changing every year and never appearing twice alike.
Let me again impress the necessity of knowing something about the internal government of man in order to know how disease develops and travels, If we observe any government, the government of the universe, civil government, the government of commerce, physical government, we find that there is one centre that rules and controls and is supreme. A man has within him by endowment of the Divine a supreme centre of government which is in the grey matter of the cerebrum and in the highest portion of the grey matter.
Everything in man, and everything that takes place in man, is prescribed over primarily by this centre, from centre to circumference. If man is injured from the external, e.g., if he has his finger torn, it will soon be repaired; the order which is in the economy from centre to circumference will repair every wrong that is on the surface caused by external violence. The order of repair is the same in external as in internal violence. Injuries are external violence, but diseases are internal disorder performing violence. All true diseases of the economy flow from centre to circumference. All miasms are true diseases.
In the government of man there is a triad, a first, second and third, which gives direction, viz.: the cerebrum, cerebellum and spinal cord, or when taken more collectively or generally, the brain, spinal cord and the nerves. Considered more internally, we have the will and understanding forming a unit making the interior man; the vital force or viceregent of the soul (that is, the limbs or soul stuff, the formative substance) which is immaterial; and then the body which is material, Thus from the innermost, the will or voluntary principle, through the limbus or simple substance to the outermost, the actual or material substance of man, which is in every cell, we have this order of direction. Every cell in man has its representative of the innermost, the middle and the outermost; there is no cell in man that does not have its will and understanding, its soul stuff or limbus or simple substance, and its material substance.
Disease must flow in accordance with this order because there is no inward flow. Man is protected against things flowing in from the outward toward the centre. All disease flows from the inner most to the outermost and unless drug substances are prepared in a form to do this they can neither produce nor cure disease. There are miasms in the universe, acute and chronic. The chronic which have no tendency toward recovery, are three, psora, syphilis and sycosis: we shall study these later.
Outside of acute and chronic miasms there are only the results of disease to be considered. The miasms are contagious; they flow from the innermost to the outer most: and while they exist in organs yet they are imperceptible, for they cannot exist in man unless they exist in form subtle enough to operate upon the innermost of man’s physical nature. The correspondence of this innermost cannot be discovered by man’s eye, by his fingers, or by any of his senses, neither can any disease cause be found with the microscope. Disease can only be perceived by its results, and it flows from within out, from centre to circumferences, from the seat of government to the outermost. Hence cure must be from within out.
In our civil government we see the likeness to this. Let any great disturbance come upon our government at Washington and see how, like lightning. this is felt to the circumference of the nation. How the whole country becomes shaken and disturbed as if by disease if it is an evil governments. If the government be good, we observe it in the form of improvement and everybody is benefited by it.
If in the great centres of commerce London Paris or New York, some great crash or crisis takes place, how the very circumference that depends upon these centres is shaken, as it were, by disease. Every little political office depends upon Washington and that order must be preserved most thoroughly. The sheriff and constable the judge and the court, are little governments dependent upon the law that is formed by the state. The law of the state would be nothing if the centre of our government at Washington were dethroned by another nation. All the law and principles in Pennsylvania depended upon the permanency and orderliness of the government in Washington, and there is a series from Washington to Harrisburg and from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. There can be no broken link.
It is now seen what is to be understood by order and directions, and that there are directions; nothing can flow in from the outermost to affect the innermost Disturb one of the courts in Philadelphia and this does not disturb the country or the constitutional government. If the finger is burnt this does not to any greater extent disturb the constitutional government of the man. but the constitutional government repairs it. It is not a disease, it does not rack the whole frame.
It is only that which shakes the whole economy, disturbs the government, which is a disease. So man may have his hand cut off without the system being disturbed, but let a little disease, measles for example, flow in from the centre and his whole economy is racked. Old- fashioned medicine talks of experience, but is entirely dependent on the eyes and fingers; appearances are wonderfully deceptive. If you examine any acute miasm you may know what it looks like, but the esse of it cannot be discovered by any of the senses.
We have seen that everything is governed from the centre. Now what comes in the direction of law, what comes from principle, comes from the centre, is flowing in accordance with order and can be confirmed by experience. To apply it more practically, what we learn from the use of the law of homoeopathics, what we observe after learning that law and the doctrines that relate to it- all our subsequent experience, confirms the principles.
For example every experience with Bryonia makes Bryonia so much brighter in mind. With experience one grows stronger; one does not change or alter with every mood, but becomes firmly established. If every thing tends to disturb the mind, that means that you are in a state of folly or that you are insane; it may be a little of both, A man that relies on experience to guide him never knows his mind is constantly changing, never settled. It has no validity. Validity is something absolutely essential to science. it is necessary for homoeopath to look upon law as valid and not upon man, as there is no man valid. In Homoeopathy it is the very principle itself that is valid, and things that are not in accordance with principle should not be admitted
In 1881, Kent accepted a position as professor of anatomy at the Homeopathic College of Missouri, an institution with which he remained affiliated until 1888. In 1890, Kent moved to Pennsylvania to take a position as Dean of Professors at the Post-Graduate Homeopathic Medical School of Philadelphia. In 1897 Kent published his magnum opus, Repertory of the Homœopathic Materia Medica. Kent moved to Chicago in 1903, where he taught at Hahnemann Medical College.